Blacks and Alzheimer’s

Compiled by Kenny Anderson

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia among older adults. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, irreversible brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and cognition — the ability to think and reason.

Stress and Alzheimer’s

Researchers believes that stress can cause inflammation in the brain, making the brain more susceptible to health problems like dementia. Stress can also lead to depression, a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s and related forms of the disease.

Moreover researchers have studied the effects of high stress events on brain health. African-Americans reported more than 60% of these stressful events and the study linked these events with lower cognitive function.

“The stressful events were throughout the lifespan a variety of things that you can imagine would be impactful and stressful. Dementia and brain health should be thought of as life-course issues, not just mid-life or late-life problems. We have to start thinking about brain health from birth, if not before.” - Dr. Maria Carrillo

“Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health evaluated data from 1,320 participants who shared information about their own stressful life experiences and then participated in cognitive tests. Researchers found that every stressful event was equal to 1.5 years of brain aging across all participants, except for African Americans, where every stressful event was equal to 4 years of brain aging. The study also found that African Americans reported 60% more stressful events on average than Caucasians, which may help to explain why there is a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s there.” - Alissa Sauer

Racism and Alzheimer's Diagnosing

Studies show Black people have a greater risk of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia and they are more likely to be diagnosed later than white patients. On average, Black patients were 72.5 years old when they underwent imaging, researchers found, compared to 67.8 years for white patients; 66.5 years for Hispanic patients; and 66.7 for others. For more info on this click on link below:

https://www.healthday.com/health-news/mental-health/black-patients-wait-longer-than-whites-for-alzheimers-diagnosis?fbclid=IwAR1IiyyRJZuF17WG7wnUIp-2LilEuWIHKY6A7kt1cRbHDVMi2OprzHDnQUM

November is Diabetes Awareness Month - A Month Blacks Should Seriously Reflect On!

by Kenny Anderson

Diabetes is a serious chronic ‘metabolic disease’ characterized by elevated levels of blood glucose (or blood sugar).

If not ‘managed’ over time diabetes will lead to various organ damage, distress, debilitation, and premature death. According to recent data from the Pan American Health Organization 50-75% of cases of diabetes in the United States is not managed ‘uncontrolled’.

Blacks and Diabetes

Blacks have higher diabetes death rates than whites in the 30 largest cities in the U.S. Currently diabetes is the 5th leading cause of death among Blacks. Indeed for Blacks in America diabetes is an epidemic:

 
*Blacks aged 20 years or older 4.9 million (18.7%) have diagnosed diabetes, according to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) national survey data

*Blacks are 77% more likely to have diagnosed diabetes to compared whites

*Blacks are at a higher risk for prediabetes than whites especially if type 2 diabetes runs in their family. Around 36% of Blacks have prediabetes, where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to be type 2 diabetes

*Blacks have very high obesity rates a major risk-factor for diabetes; nearly 50 percent of Blacks are clinically obese: about 40% of Black men and 80% or four out of five Black women are considered overweight or obese

*Blacks with diabetes are at a much greater risk factor for heart disease and stroke, suffering and dying disproportionately from them

*Blacks with diabetes are more at risk for mental health problems (depression, anxiety)

*Black women who develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy face a 52% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the future compared to white women diagnosed with gestational diabetes

*Diabetes is the number #1 cause of kidney disease; kidney disease requiring dialysis or transplant is far more common among Blacks. The average life expectancy on dialysis is 5-10 years; the leading cause of death in diabetic individuals on dialysis is ‘heart failure’ (55.6%), while sepsis accounted for 20.6% of the deaths 

*Blacks are 2.6-5.6 times as likely to suffer from kidney disease and are at least 2.6 times more likely to have end stage kidney renal disease due to diabetes than whites

*Black diabetics are 2.7 times as likely to suffer from lower-limb amputations

*Diabetic retinopathy 'disease of the retina' is almost 50% more prevalent in Blacks than whites

*Blacks have a higher risk of developing diabetic eye disease and vision loss than most other racial and ethnic groups; diabetic eye diseases include diabetic retinopathy, macular edema (which usually develops along with diabetic retinopathy), cataracts, and glaucoma

Since millions of Blacks have diabetes and millions more are prediabetic, raising ‘diabetes awareness’ is critical ‘health literacy’ so that many Blacks can reduce the likelihood that they will develop type 2 diabetes or those with it can reduce the likelihood that they’ll get complications from it.

BLACK FOLKS PROMOTING ‘DIABETES AWARENESS’ IS A MUST – SPREAD THE WORD!

5 Factors That Affect Mental Health in African American Communities

by Tanya St. John

Mental illness does not discriminate. One in four Americans will experience a behavioral health disorder in any given year regardless of age, race, religion, gender or economic status. Anyone can develop a mental health disorder.

However, there are factors that can increase the vulnerability to and severity of mental health disorders in the African American population and decrease their likelihood of seeking and receiving adequate treatment, including:

1. RACISM

Mental Health America points out that, “Despite progress made over the years, racism continues to have an impact on the mental health of Black/African Americans. Negative stereotypes and attitudes of rejection have decreased, but continue to occur with measurable, adverse consequences. 

Historical and contemporary instances of negative treatment have led to a mistrust of authorities, many of whom are not seen as having the best interests of Black/African Americans in mind.”

Evidence of the historic context that contributes to mistrust within the African American community can be seen in the pseudoscience of “diseases” such as Drapetomia and Dysaethesia Aethiopica, created to maintain the status quo of slavery in the South.

During slavery, an overt display of mental illness often resulted in more frequent beatings and abuse, which forced slaves to disguise or hide their mental health issues (Hastings, Jones, & Martin, 2015). 

The outcomes of these events have been long-lasting, perpetuating myths about mental illness. Sixty-three percent of African Americans believe that depression is a personal weakness. Family and community members often insist on prayer as a singular solution over seeking professional treatment:

“Why are you depressed? If our people could make it through slavery, we can make it through anything.” “When a black woman suffers from a mental disorder, the opinion is that she is weak. And weakness in black women is intolerable.” “You should take your troubles to Jesus, not some stranger/ psychiatrist.”
(Depression and African Americans, Mental Health America)

In more recent history, the CDC details the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment which did not inform its subjects, 600 black men, of the study’s true purpose, and did not provide proper treatment, among other failures. 

Further support for this barrier of mistrust is explained in Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Man’s Disease, (Beacon Press 2010), by author and Vanderbilt University Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, Jonathan Metzl. 

Metzl researched Michigan’s Iona State Hospital records and uncovered a disproportionate diagnosis of schizophrenia in African American men during the 1960’s and 70’s, speculating that the much of the misplaced hysteria was attributable to involvement of African American males involvement in the civil rights movements of the time.

2. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Some African Americans even see mental illness as a punishment from God. Up to 85 percent of African Americans describe themselves as “fairly religious” or “religious” and they commonly use prayer as a way to handle stress, according to one study cited by the American Psychiatric Association. 

Spiritual beliefs, family, and community are a great source of emotional support, but can be a barrier to receiving needed professional medical or therapeutic treatment. Faith communities can become a source of distress if they are not educated about mental illness and ways to support individuals and families in their struggle for recovery.

3. POVERTY

While mental illness is not by any means restricted to individuals of lower economic status, the stressors that can accompany poverty – hunger, homelessness, lack of other basic needs or an inability to find jobs or afford treatment – can be contributing factors. U.S. Census Bureau data shows the 2014 poverty rate for African Americans was 26.2 percent. 

According to the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, “it is well documented that mental illness is exacerbated by poverty. However, more recently, it has been recognized that poverty may contribute to the onset of mental illness.” 

In a continuing downward spiral, mental illness can increase health care costs, effect overall health, and lead to further impoverishment. African Americans make up 40 percent of today’s homeless population.

4. VIOLENCE

African Americans of all ages are more likely to witness or be victims of serious violent crimes. Exposure to violence increases the risk of developing a mental health condition such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. African American children are more likely than other children to be exposed to violence, which can have a profound, long-term effect on their mental health.

5. LACK OF PROVIDER CULTURAL COMPETENCY

A lack of cultural competency in the mental health care system can also pose barriers to seeking professional help. Only 3.7 percent of American Psychiatric Association members and 1.5 percent of American Psychological Association members are African American. According to Psychology Today, “studies have shown that African Americans view the typical psychologist as an ‘older, white male, who would be insensitive to the social and economic realities of their lives.'”

Without proper treatment, mental health conditions can worsen and make day-to-day life harder. Silence and stoicism – denying oneself help in order to appear strong – need to be overcome. True strength lies in recognizing the need for help and seeking it out. To make progress in this arena, there needs to be:

*An end to the stigma by increasing awareness of mental health needs in the African American community

*An increase in the number of African American mental health professionals and greater cultural competency in those currently in the field

*Increased education in the faith communities about the role of professional mental health treatments and how they can work together

*A greater focus on prevention, intervention, and maintenance

Breaking the Black Emotional Dysfunctional Code

 by Kenny Anderson

I often hear young adult Blacks say use the terms that they’re ‘hyped-up’, ‘amped-up’, ‘geeked-up’, their use of these terms generally refers to them being excited, provoked, or stimulated by drugs or alcohol.

Unbeknownst to young adult Blacks and to the overwhelming majority of us the terms ‘hyped-up’, ‘amped-up’, ‘geeked-up’ can also be used as psychological 'clinical' terms that describe historical ‘hyper-arousal’ symptoms of Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder (Cultural-Specific PTSD).

Hyper-arousal is a primary symptom of general Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that occurs when a person’s body suddenly kicks into high alert as a result of thinking about their trauma. Even though real danger may not be present, their body acts as if it is causing lasting stress after a traumatic event.

The relentless brutal enslavement and traumatization of our Ancestors, this intense chronic stress environment negatively altered their genes ‘epigenetically’ amplifying their temperaments and nervous system producing a temperamental predisposition to hyper-arousal passed down to us genetically.

Behaviorally this hyper-arousal causes hyper-sensitivity ‘emotional over-sensitivity’ and ‘emotional agitation’ (irritability). Moreover hyper-arousal increases a state of being emotionally ‘hyper-vigilant’ causing over-sensitivity to your surroundings, being 'over-alert' to hidden dangers from others even when real danger does not exist; hyper-vigilance increases pre-emptive strike violence, distrust, and alienation.

Emotional irritability is a personality dimension characterized by a tendency to be thin-skinned, moody, easily annoyed, defensive, dissatisfied, frustrated, angry, and reactive to pettiness, slight provocations, and disagreements.

When you combine hyper-arousal emotional irritability with unrealistic expectations, negative self-fulfilling prophecies, and Black self-hate you get failed or dysfunctional relationships, Black-on-Black violence, intra-organization divisiveness, and overall disunity.

This unaddressed self-sabotaging hyper-arousal is expressed by Black folks all the time, you know we say towards so many of us individually “if it aint one thing with you it's another” and “I can’t stand you – you get on my last nerves,” and we say collectively about us “Black folks just can’t get along with each other, we aint gonna never stick together!” “You know when a lot of Blacks folks come together something bad is going to happen.”

The great Black revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon remarked that racially “colonized people suffer many psychological wounds which are horribly afflicting, and there is no reason to believe that such illnesses will ever completely resolve; thus the patients’ lives will always be ‘compromised’.”

Indeed, white supremacy has genetically imprinted us with hyper-arousal; severely left us emotionally compromised ‘over-sensitive’ and ‘emotional agitated’ that undermines our ability to get along with each other on a basic level.

As Black folks we must deepen our understanding ‘emotional intelligence’ of the impact of historical racist forces on our emotional lives that negatively impacts our well-being, our families, our relationships, our organizations, and our communities by practicing emotional mindfulness. Indeed as Black folks we must emotionally uncompromise ourselves!

Breaking the Black Emotional Dysfunctional Code (BEDC)

Breaking the Black Emotional Dysfunctional Code healing method works by figuring out and detecting your specific negative emotions ‘codes’ that are energy ‘chords’ that binds us back ‘originally’ to our enslaved foremothers’ womb ‘emotional distress fetal programming’.

During pregnancy our enslaved foremothers were gripped by the emotional distress of extreme homesickness (anxiety trauma) ‘forcibly stripped from Africa’ and heartbrokenness (depression) of ‘children stripped from them and sold’. These original distressed maternal emotions are genetically embedded in our subconscious.

These inherited dysfunctional trapped emotions are the basis of ‘Post Slavery Emotional Distress Disorder’ (PSEDD) that causes pain, self-sabotage, emotional problems, and all kinds of malfunction and disease - such as physical pain, anger, depression, fatigue, chronic stress, PTSD, phobias, panic attacks along with relationship problems (conflicts, violence, divorce, etc.).

As Black folks these trapped emotions are negative emotional energies that we still carry around ‘DNA’ from slavery; past events, traumas, abuse, and current emotional distress. Trapped emotions can contribute significantly to physical health problems ‘chronic diseases’ like hypertension, heart disease, and stroke;

Without awareness of these disturbing and disrupting negative trapped emotions there is a ‘fatalistic tendency' amongst Black folks to view them religiously as a ‘curse from God’, or ‘it is what is’ – apathetically aint nothing you can do about it.

As mentioned these negative emotions are trapped in the subconscious that retains everything emotionally about you: your Ancestral emotions and your emotional experiences that unconsciously ‘drives’ influences your specific situational feeling ‘reactions’. Indeed negative trapped emotions can exert a dramatic effect on how you think, the choices that you make, and how you react to everyday life challenges.

Again the accumulation of Black emotional distress begins in our genetic emotional predisposition, emotional state of our mothers during pregnancy; the emotional quality of family and community relationships; the emotional quality of significant relationships throughout our lives.

Consider thinking of trapped emotions as blocks of energy that can be ‘stuck’ barriers in the body; that these stubborn emotional traits block positive emotions from arising. Unblocking trapped negative emotions should be identified individually and released one at a time, not in groups or bundles.

Breaking the Black Emotional Dysfunctional Code is an ongoing practice of deep reflective and analytical review ‘unblocking process’ to identify, to understand, and to release trapped negative emotions for the goal of ‘emotional management’ and transformation ‘emotional emancipation’.

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

By Brandon Keim

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on Black kids, it might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life, particularly African - American children 
"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many.

Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school.

Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals. Evans and Schamberg’s findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete.

In addition to poverty’s many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too. "A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood," they wrote.

To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students’ blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It’s in these brain regions that working memory is centered. Evans and Schamberg didn’t scan their human subjects’ brains, but the test results suggest that the same basic mechanisms operate in kids.

"Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models," said Rockefeller University neuro - endocrinologist Bruce McEwen. "Now there are beginnings of work on our own species. The Evans paper is an important step in that direction."

McEwen also noted that, at least in animals, the effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty’s effects could be hereditary.

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. "They’re not really saying which causal events were stressful. They’re just measuring biological markers of stress," said Kim Noble, a Columbia University psycho-biologist who studies the relationship between child poverty and cognition.

Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured. "I think that different cognitive outcomes have different causes," said Noble. "Something like working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be associated with hours spent reading to your children."

But Noble still said the study "was very well-done. They have an impressive data set." And though some details remain incomplete, she said, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.

"Policy changes that affect environments that might affect cognitive development and brain change, that’s the ultimate future of the field," she said.

How Bigotry Created a Black Mental Health Crisis

Racism has led to misdiagnosis, incarceration instead of treatment

by Kylie Smith

July is Minority Mental Health Month, established to spotlight the flawed diagnosis of mental illness among minorities. Black men, for example, are nearly six times as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as white men. That problem is compounded by the fact that for minorities, especially African Americans, mental-health care often gets provided in prison, where the standard of care is so low that lack of treatment has fueled a suicide epidemic.

States are repeatedly finding themselves in court for this malpractice. Just last month, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to take immediate steps to improve its mental health services or face a court takeover of the prison system management.

Why is so much mental health care provided to African Americans in prison? First and foremost, because African Americans are overrepresented in our prisons and jails.

There are also other historical factors that exacerbate the problem. Over the past two centuries, medical and legal professionals mislabeled behavior such as escaping slavery and advocating for civil rights as a byproduct of psychiatric madness. 

Even worse, instead of treating this purported madness, they simply locked patients in facilities with deplorable conditions. This criminalization of mental health has strengthened the control of white authorities over African Americans by simultaneously delegitimizing activism and justifying incarceration. 

The racial disparities in mental health today have grown from centuries of racism, and only by addressing these systemic problems can we adequately provide mental health care to minority populations.

Racial disparities in diagnosing conditions such as schizophrenia are sometimes presented as an effect of biology, but they are not. Instead, they are the direct result of racist thinking about African American psychology that dates to at least the 18th century. 

Slave owners and their apologist physicians invented psychiatric “disorders” such as “draeptomania” to explain the urge to run away. In the lead-up to the Civil War, they distorted statistics to argue that freedom would drive the ex-enslaved crazy. They also propagated the idea that African Americans were more childlike and simplistic, incapable of feeling pain or sorrow, to justify experimentation and exploitation.

After the Civil War, as the South struggled with emancipation and Reconstruction, the black psyche was increasingly portrayed as immoral and inherently criminal, justifying both the need for Jim Crow and mass incarceration, in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Sometimes the line between the two was exceedingly thin, with mental health-care facilities that functioned more like prisons than places of treatment.

Across the country, but especially in the South during the era of Jim Crow, these hospitals were segregated, with black patients held in separate parts of the institutions or in separate locations entirely. While the Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision mandated these facilities be equal to those provided to white patients, in practice, they most certainly were not.

Instead, in many states such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, African American patients suffered from state-sanctioned confinement and neglect. In Alabama alone, thousands of people were subjected to decades of substandard housing and nutrition in deathtrap buildings. 

Hospitals were presided over by white male superintendents who employed unlicensed Cuban refugee doctors, ordered massive amounts of electroshock and chemical “therapies,” and put patients to work in the fields as though the hospitals were still plantations. These states were not outliers - they were just the tip of the national iceberg.

In Alabama, these conditions went unchallenged until 1969, when Judge Frank Johnson heard a case brought by civil rights advocates and the federal government after a joint Justice Department and Department of Health, Education and Welfare investigation revealed horrendous conditions and almost no state spending on black patients, including children. Less than 50 cents per patient per day was allocated for food and clothing. Searcy, the black-only hospital in Mobile, had never applied for federal funds to develop treatment programs because it did not believe black patients would respond.

Science, however, did not back this claim. Numerous witnesses declared there was no medical justification for segregation and no scientific difference between black and white mental illness. Looking at this evidence, Johnson declared the conditions for African Americans in Alabama’s mental hospitals unconstitutional and ordered they be fixed.

The state largely avoided enacting such changes, however, and this problem would only be exacerbated because, just as activists were tackling these deplorable conditions, their civil rights activism prompted the psychiatric community to create new justifications for diagnosing mental health issues among African Americans. 

In 1968, the American Psychiatric Association took deliberate steps to change the definition of schizophrenia to include “aggression” where it had previously not. While the APA denied (and has continued to do so) charges that such a definition would target the civil rights activism of black men, the research of historian Jonathan Metzl reveals this claim to be disingenuous. The anger of black men was portrayed as a byproduct of mental illness, rather than a fight against oppression. New drugs intended to target the angry black man were advertised to psychiatrists.

The mislabeling of African American activism as a pathology and the intertwined history of racism and abuse has had long-lasting consequences. The effort to demonize activism as a mental illness has meant those who are sick may struggle to seek treatment - African Americans are significantly less likely than white people to trust a psychiatrist. 

Blacks are also less likely to be covered by insurance that includes mental health services, especially in states such as Alabama that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. These structural problems often lead to a cycle of lack of care, homelessness and imprisonment.

Rather than receiving treatment for illness, African Americans end up incarcerated because of its symptoms. As the ongoing Alabama lawsuit demonstrates, the same states that warehoused African Americans without offering adequate treatment for mental illness more than 50 years ago are still locking away people in the same hideous conditions.

This tendency to incarcerate the mentally ill instead of treating them is not just a Southern problem. It’s a national one. The largest mental health facility in the country is the Los Angeles County Jail. But prisons are not mental health-care providers, and prison life itself is known to make mental illness worse.

The consequences of a system that overlays race with criminality is a lack of funding for mental health services where people need them and a continued belief that there is something biologically wrong with African Americans. We are both over-diagnosing some mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and under-diagnosing others, such as depression, mistaking symptoms for criminality that deserve punishment, not treatment.

Instead, we should be making mental health services affordable and accessible, and keeping people with mental illness out of jail. We must also be careful not to see mental illness in activism and assertiveness. 

When we talk about disparities in mental health, we need to look at these systemic issues, and not perpetuate myths about biological difference. The problem in psychiatry is not race it’s centuries of racism.

The Case for Emotional Reparations

By Enola G. Aird
Founder and President
Community Healing Network 

“Who’s going to pay reparations for our souls?” – Gil Scot Herron

Any serious conversation about reparations must begin with a deep and broad appreciation of the dynamics of enslavement, Jim Crow, and colonization. 

It’s one thing to condemn the past as a “crime against humanity,” it’s something else to try to appreciate and then calculate the full extent of the damage. 

The issue is much bigger than the trillions of dollars owed for the multi-generational financial damage inflicted upon people of African ancestry. 

It’s true that much of the wealth of Europe, the United States, Canada, and Latin America was built with the uncompensated labor of Black people. But even if that enormous debt were to be paid in full, there would still be a long way to go. 

Our moral and legal claim for reparations for financial harm pales in comparison to our moral and legal claim for emotional reparations. The term “emotional reparations” refers to what will be needed to repair completely the generation upon generation of emotional and psychological harm inflicted on our ancestors, on us, and on our children.  

The emotional harm is the greatest harm of all. To fully assess the emotional and psychological damage, we need to look beyond enslavement and colonization, and even racism. We need to focus on the source of the many manifestations of anti-Blackness. 

Full reparations must include repair of the damage done by the poisonous lie of White superiority and Black inferiority: the root cause of the devaluing of Black lives and the underdevelopment of Black communities. It must include the work of extinguishing the lie. 

Every person of African ancestry born over the course of the last 600 years has come into a world that profoundly devalues our lives. Starting in the 1400s, in order to justify the enslavement of Africans and the economic exploitation of Africa, Europeans devised a hierarchy of humanity with “White” people at the top and “Black” people at the bottom often even outside of the circle of humanity. 

They created a poisonous ideology of White superiority and Black inferiority, a lie that dehumanized people of African ancestry and has come to permeate nearly every institution of global society and the global mind. 

The advantages conferred by “Whiteness” and the disadvantages imposed by “Blackness” have been multiplying over the course of nearly six centuries. 

For all of that time, people of African ancestry have been living our lives according to a narrative written for us by Europeans to serve their interests. 

The result has been racial trauma, a multi-generational, historical and continuing wound that has profoundly undermined our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being. 

In order to step out the narrative created for us by Europeans and into a narrative of our own making, we must go through a process of emotional repair. 

The greatest damage done by the lie of Black inferiority can be seen in the way that it has undermined our ability, as a people, to fully love ourselves and each other. 

It undermines our ability to love what we see in the mirror, to walk with confidence in the world, and to think clearly. That is at the heart of the crime against our humanity.  

We as people of African ancestry, notwithstanding the weight of the lie on our shoulders, have accomplished truly remarkable things. But these attainments have come at a heavy price: relentless racial stress and trauma and their physical and psychological effects. 

So by all means let’s keep pressing for full reparations because they are due and owing. Let’s support H.R. 40 to create a commission to study the issue. But let’s not forget that the greatest harm that has been done to people of African ancestry is the harm to our psyche and our emotions. 

Our strongest moral and legal claim for reparations is our claim for all the resources, including financial, that it will take to make us whole emotionally to restore our dignity and humanity as people of African ancestry and restore us to our rightful place in the human family. That is the greatest debt that is owed to us.

But whatever others may or may not do to meet their moral and legal obligations to repair the emotional damage inflicted upon our ancestors, us, and our children, the basic work of emotional reparations the repairing of that emotional harm depends upon us.

That is the fundamental premise of the movement for emotional emancipation the movement for freedom from the lie. So even if those outside of our community fail to meet their obligations, even if they do nothing, we can and will follow our amazing ancestors, and make a way out of no way.

                 Our Children and our Ancestors are waiting!